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Amor Pedestre

(Love on Foot)

Italy
1914. Dir Marcel Fabre.

Amor Pedestre (1914) was part of a series of comic films directed by and starring Marcel Fabre as the protagonist, Robinet. In Amor Pedestre, he sets out on his morning walk and encounters a young lady he immediately attempts to woo. Despite her lack of interest, he closely follows her into a tramway and around the streets of a big city. While the plot of Fabre's silent film is a typical bourgeois story of an illicit love affair and subsequent revenge, what makes it unique is the angle in which the film was shot. The director's decision to capture on celluloid the legs and feet of his actors, rather than their entire bodies (and faces) is a coup-de-génie. Clearly experimenting with the possibilities that the new invention of cinema was offering, almost a hundred years later Fabre's film remains a fresh vision.